


Music

by jewelianna88



Category: Popslash
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-23
Updated: 2011-04-23
Packaged: 2017-10-18 13:43:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/189474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jewelianna88/pseuds/jewelianna88
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Joey hears music.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Music

Joey first heard the music the day after the lawsuit was filed. He woke up and someone was playing “The William Tell Overture,” the pretty part at the beginning that sounded like morning and birds chirping and springtime.

Except no one was playing music.

“Could you guys turn that down?” he yelled, rolling out of bed in Justin’s mom’s house, where they’d all spent the night before. None of them wanted to be alone when they were being sued for breach of contract and millions of dollars they didn’t have. It was a comfort thing, banding together. If they were separated, they were weak. Even it if wasn’t true, it was believable.

“Turn what down?” JC was still in his pajamas watching MTV. Their picture flashed on the screen, and the music swelled louder.

“The music. Who’s listening to classical, anyway?” No one ever listened to classical music. It was rap or hip-hop or old school rock with them, never anything that might be considered high class or good for the mind.

JC turned off the TV and turned to look at him. There were dark circles under his eyes. Under all of their eyes, Joey thought.

“What music?”

“You don’t hear that?” It was so loud that Joey almost couldn’t hear JC talking. The quiet melodies had given way to the hectic middle portion of the piece. It made Joey think of tornados.

“I don’t hear anything,” JC said. “It’s in your head, dude.”

Joey frowned. He knew what it was to have a song stuck in his head, and this wasn’t that. It was real. It was a freakin’ orchestra playing a big fancy classical piece. That wasn’t the kind of thing you had in your head.

Leaving JC to his own insanity, he left the room and checked the stereos. They were all off. The big central stereo system and every clock radio, boom box, and Discman he could find. The music kept playing, even when he yanked the plugs out of the walls. Even when he raced to the basement and flipped the circuit breaker, in case he’d missed something somewhere. He stood in the dark and heard violins, and wondered if he was going crazy.

Chris found him there, sitting on the floor of Justin’s mom’s basement, a flashlight in his hand.

“Dude, are you OK?” They’d all been less than OK over the past few weeks, so Chris’s concern was well-placed. And appreciated. But this wasn’t about the lawsuit.

“I don’t know.” He was freaking out, a little. More than a little. He was freaking out majorly. “Do you hear music?”

Chris cocked his head and listened intently. His face was a mask of concentration. “No. Why? Do you?”

Joey nodded slightly. He was getting hot- there was no air conditioning in the cellar. “Since I woke up. I guess I’ve got this song in my head, or something.” It was winding down, though. Joey wondered how he could have it stuck in his head if he didn’t really know how it went.

“Weird.” Chris was still standing on the bottom step, dangling one foot. When Chris looked up to concentrate on him more fully, the music changed to low, quiet tunes. It was somber, he thought, but as he sat there listening to the music in his head, it picked up faster and the secondary melody began. It was a long piece, something by someone famous. He’d heard it before, at high school concert or something.

“Yeah.” Joey shook his head, and went back to bed, brushing past Chris on the stairway. This was one very bizarre dream.

Except it wasn’t a dream, because he woke up again two hours later with the “1812 Overture” playing, already to the loud part with the canons and the French National Anthem stuck in there.

**

He was going slowly mad. Chris was the only one who noticed.

“What’s up with you?” he said one morning. They were all dressed up for meetings again. Joey had never worn a suit so much in his life.

He chewed on his lips, not knowing how much to say. “I hear music.”

Chris blinked, blankly.

“Like, I see dead people, only I hear music. It’s there, all the time, and no one else hears it. I think I’m crazy.”

Chris tilted his head to the side. He was so quiet lately, so out of character. Instead of replying, he took Joey’s hand in his, palm to palm. Joey’s fingers were long enough that he could just touch Chris’s wrist and feel the pulse there. It fell into tempo with the Chopin Sonata he’d been hearing since he woke up.

The music didn’t stop, but Joey felt a little less insane.

**

He made an appointment with a shrink. He had to wedge it in between depositions. She talked about stress, and he rolled his eyes. She told him that he should try meditation. When that didn’t work, she offered medication. He couldn’t take those, because they made him loopy and he had to keep meeting with lawyers.

The attorneys wanted to know everything about his early days-- how much Lou spent on them, how many hours they worked each week, how many shows they’d performed in what cities. His parents’ financial records were being subpoenaed, because the credit card he’d been using for the past three years was cosigned in their name. It was a mess and it kept getting worse, not better.

Through it all, the music kept playing.

He went to Chris when it got to be too much. Chris was the only one who knew.

‘”What are you hearing?” Chris would ask, squishing down next to Joey on the bench at the kitchen table. Joey would tell him and Chris would start humming along. Usually they weren’t in the same place when they started, but always by the end. Joey never figured out how that worked. Chris would sometimes rub his back as he hummed, and that was always in time to the rhythm too.

There were different songs for different people, and different situations. Justin was something by Beethoven, the symphony that had been in Fantasia with all the little Greek gods and flying horses. It was light and pretty, but there was a stormy part to it. JC was a string quartet, possible Mozart. Not the famous Looney Tunes one, but something less recognizable but just as pretty and complex. Lance was a cello solo, like the one he’d seen Yo Yo Ma playing on PBS a couple of years ago. It was full of beautiful arpeggios and melodies, simple yet soothing. It wasn’t hard to figure out that the songs were somehow tied to his friends personalities. He heard Copland when he talked to his parents, and something like a funeral dirge when the lawyers came into a room.

When he was overly agitated, the music would switch from something that raged in a cacophony of sound to Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, as if the conductor in his head was trying to calm him down. It only happened a few times, but it worked. That was the only time when he felt like he wasn’t going crazy.

**

Joey wished he knew what all of the music was. The scariest part was that he was hearing pieces that he’d never listened to before, and seemed to know every note. Every tempo change was familiar, every bit of dynamic contrast expected and anticipated.

“Do you think I’m going crazy?” he asked Chris, as they waited for a car to pick them up the lawyer’s office. JC, Lance, and Justin were still inside being deposed. Again. Court had better come soon, before they all went crazy. He laughed at the irony, knowing he was probably almost there already.

Chris paused a long time before answering, making Joey’s stomach twist into nervous tangles.

“I think,” he said, “that you’re pretty lucky. I don’t know anyone else who has a soundtrack to their own life.” He wrapped one arm around Joey’s back- he couldn’t quite reach his shoulders- and squeezed, in a reassuring shrug. Hugs from Chris always had a level of comfort that far outreached the span of his arms. Joey could have cried. In his head, his orchestra was playing the Moonlight Sonata.

**

When the found out they might lose their name, it was “Beautiful Dreamer” that was playing in his head. That wasn’t the real title for the piece, but he knew the melody. He thought it was a pretty fucking weird selection, but he never got to choose the repertoire.

“It won’t happen,” Chris said. “I promise you, that it won’t happen.”

“You can’t promise that,” Joey said. “You can’t.”

“I just did.” The car came, then, and they climbed into the backseat. Joey laid his head against the window on the drive home. Chris kept one hand on Joey’s knee for the whole time.

**

It was JC’s idea to go back into the studio. They called in favors from all over the business and began to sing. All of their songs, all of those amazing songs that they’d spent years picking out and writing were gone. Their follow-up album was wiped out.

Joey thought that anyone else would have given up, but they just kept going. There was a grand Souza march playing in his head when he drove to the studio.

Somehow, the songs they were recording fit into the music in his head. When he told Chris, he’d just shrugged.

“It’s a weird world,” he’d said. “If you can play Pink Floyd to the Wizard of Oz, then why can’t you play boyband pop to Beethoven?”

**

Chris was the only one who didn’t have a song. He had a lot of them. Sometimes they were warm and pretty. The day before the trial, Joey finally broke down. It was Chris who sat down next to Joey and held him when he cried. Joey heard “Claire De Lune.” It soothed him as he sobbed, taking away all of the hurt and fear and leaving him with a feeling of being intensely loved. During the trial itself, Chris took the stand and talked about the twenty hour days, cheap hotel rooms, and limited security they’d had in Europe. His voice rose and trembled with anger. Joey’s head played “Night On Bald Mountain.”

Back at their hotel room, Joey had rubbed the tension out of Chris’s back and hummed “Fur Elise” until Chris fell asleep. Joey curled up next to him and let the music play him to sleep.

When he woke, it was still there. Chris was watching him with dark soulful eyes. The touch of his lips didn’t surprise Joey. The softness of them did, and the way Chris took careful time tasting every corner of Joey’s mouth before changing angles.

When they parted to breathe, Joey realized that he was hearing Holst’s “Planets”. “Jupiter”, to be specific, and he felt like he was really there, on another planet, spinning around the solar system at a pace he’d never experienced before. When Chris opened his eyes and looked at him, Joey knew he was smiling.

“I hear the music when I kissed you,” he said, then leaned forward to kiss him again. Joey opened his mouth to him and wondered why they hadn’t been doing this all along.

**

The music ended the day after the lawsuit did. When the verdict had been handed down, Joey’s orchestra (for they were his now-- he imagined the tiny people in his head wearing matching black and white outfits, with their tiny conductor and little instruments), was playing the “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s Messiah. He’d rolled his eyes at the cheesiness of it, then swung Chris up into a giant embrace in the courthouse foyer. Later, he’d kissed him to the tune of “Spring” from Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons,” and everything had been perfect.

When he woke up the next day, the silence was deafening. He lay in bed, perfectly still, straining to hear, but the music was gone.

Beside him, a body shifted, then warmth crept around him as he was hugged. Chris’s hair tickled his shoulder and legs. Joey turned his head and saw the sun shining out the window.

When Chris kissed him awake, he pulled back. Joey knew that he knew.

“I know. It’s gone.” Joey didn’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed. Somehow, over the months of music, he’d become used it, expecting it, even enjoying it.

Chris kissed him again, using his hands to play Joey like a piano, tracing the curves of his body from top to bottom under the white cotton hotel sheets. Without the music, it was more, so much more. Joey gave in kissed back, losing himself in Chris’s warm mouth and soft hands. They never spoke of what was happening. They didn’t need to.

**

The music has been gone for a long time, now, and Joey grew used to the silence again. Things got so big, so fast, that sometimes he forgot about the time when he did hear the music. It’s like it didn’t even happen.

But when he kisses Chris, he can sometimes still hear the violins.

END


End file.
